Microsoft Dynamics SL is one of the ERP products in the Dynamics family.
This product was acquired from Solomon 2000.
The product is typically used by SMBs, particularly in project-based businesses (e.g. construction). It has strong accounting and project management capabilities.
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Prophix
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, is used to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making within a harmonized user experience. To reduce complexity and uncertainty, the software offers automated insights and planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and consolidation functionalities.
Both of these other solutions were on our top 3 list. Based on responses to single-sign-on and multi-factor authentications, Solver was rated our number 3 choice. Workday Analytics was more "polished" and offered a great product. In the end, it was the customer service …
I don't remember the other 2 demo's we had 6 years ago, but we loved Prophix from the first demo. We could see that it looked enough like excel in the end user templates that everyone would be comfortable using it right away. At the same time for our upper management, the …
For a small to mid-size business, MS Dynamics SL is effective. We are capable of managing our finances with a very low risk of error. We have worked with MS Dynamics for almost 15 years and have more than doubled the size of our business in that time with very few issues from the program. We have exponentially increased our revenue and reporting demands and have found SL to be very dependable and stable. The program does have the occasional glitch and those are sometimes outside of the realm of expertise of our IT department. SL support is excellent, but their timeliness is not as urgent as ours.
Being able to allow all budget holders access to their reports via Prophix and having charts on the dashboards which give an image of where we are financially as a company each month is really helpful, our users appreciate the access and not receiving emails with reports. The drill down in the reports provides much more detail for the budget holders and going forward we are going to try to use the line item details to provided a greater amount of information. Using the Detailed Planning Manager for Personnel Planning during budget setting was a game changer - being able to view the costs and being much more accurate with regard to start and end dates and applying a cost of living increase which we could adjust to see how it would affect the budget overall was really helpful.
Provides flexibility for complex project based cost accounting
Strong and flexible allocation processer for cost allocations, markups, and pricing
A "Flexible Billing" module under the project controller series that allows for multiple billing formats ranging from fixed price schedule of values, T&M or Cost Plus, and scheduled billing.
Flexible reporting with options using Crystal Reports, SSRS, a Quick Query tool, and ability to tie into MS Office tools such as MS Access and MS Excel
Tight integration with Financials, but also the ability to integrate with modules such as Sales Order, Inventory, and Field Service
Customization abilities ranging from a VBA (visual basic for application) foundation to allow customizing existing forms to the ability to use the SDK (Software Development Kit) to build more complex customizations that integrate with Dynamics SL.
ONU has benefitted by moving away from a centralized, Excel-based budget process by implementing Prophix to a decentralized process that engages budget managers in the development of the University's budget.
Prophix offers tremendous flexibility in reporting that is not available through our ERP system.
Prophix is very adaptable to many different types of industries. Its flexibility and adaptability is one of its biggest strengths.
The ability to set up workflows for a variety of tasks within Prophix is very beneficial for tracking purposes.
Reporting in the Project module is lacking functionality. I understand that most companies have specific needs when it comes to tracking project information but the standard reports are not good.
I would recommend a product like Management Reporter that is for Projects only. Project Reporter should allow users to pull in all Project related data into reports.
Fixing suspended batches. Obviously all of us users have experienced this mess. SL knows what needs to be corrected and there could be some step by step fixes in a separate repair module to do the steps we do in Query Analyzer.
Version control; there are issues using the same budget version in multiple years if adding detail (line item detail). What Prophix has explained as a benefit is a huge detriment for us and we've been working with them for 6 months on a fix and it's yet to get resolved
There are certain aspects that a messy; within our budgeting and forecasting detail, we have "unexplained balance" lines that show up that are distracting and add no value.
Lack of a centralized location for content outside of tool; for example, training, help, support, intranet, etc are all separate websites and not easy to get to. I'm not sure why all of this isn't linked to the same account and accessible through the tool. Why should we need separate passwords for everything Prophix?!
Unfortunately, Dynamics' lack of ability to smoothly integrate with our CRM system is causing us to look at other solutions. The efficiencies that we gain by using Dynamics for our day to day accounting are lost in the constant headaches of getting sales quotes to import properly into the system for invoicing. Another major issue for us has been budgeting and reporting. We currently do all of our budgeting and board reporting in Excel, which is too time consuming and inefficient, especially when a system as robust as Dynamics should easily be able to handle this relatively simple task.
The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments
I rate it a 10 because we have removed the fields we don't need so users can really crank the data into the system. The software was designed for the professional services firm in mind but does a tremendous job for construction firms and "blended" companies that are both distribution firms but project centric as well. Perhaps they drop ship inventory to a project where their employees or subs need to work on a project for example.
The data can be sliced and diced many ways, and each user is able to do it however they like. It is easy to create or run existing reports. We have made many of our processes more efficient, and Prophix has allowed us to save more time than you can imagine. We are able to use Prophix for Expense tracking, Expense and Capital planning, reforecasting, Compensation planning, Project tracking, Expense allocation, GAAP PLOB reporting, and still have several more tasks to implement through Prophix
We have had only one unplanned outage for 2 hours in the last 30 months. We shut down for 30 min to 1 hour once a month, but that is for Microsoft OS updates to the servers. Being a 24/7 world wide operation, the reliability is really important. We do get an 8 hour window on the weekend that we can be down for a short period to install Microsoft Dynamics SL updates, but we do not have many of those. On our last version upgrade, we shut the users out at 9:30 am and were fully operational in less than 6 hours. The upgrade was New SQL server, New SL server and 2 new Citrix servers.
Prophix's CS is one of the best that we communicate with. Response time is reasonable, and they can communicate via email or phone or Teams. Multiple ways to communicate and if any additional questions that they cannot answer, i am redirected to the correct individual to assist
Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.
Support is only used when needed, so unfortunately ,they get all the odd issues. It's a difficult business, but Microsoft and our firm do a great job of meeting customer needs. We get routine feedback that our support services are very good.
The Prophix staff is very helpful and quick to respond. I like that they teach me instead of doing it for me when possible, so I don't have to contact them as often! Never talked to anyone at Prophix that I didn't respect or think highly of! Very professional, great customer service!
The initial integration consultant was very helpful in making sure we were set up with all the essential uses we required: reporting/budgeting/forecasting. There was a learning curve but our consultant made it very easy to understand and helped me be comfortable in my Global Admin role in the system. Even after integration, we were given support whenever I came up with an idea I would get in touch and I would be trained on how I can implement it.
We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.
Just to let it take its course. The implementation for me once I became a part of my former organization was pretty seamless. Just get to know the basics and call the support team to ask questions if you need help on an issue, should they arise. They are ready, willing, and able to help!
Prophix Consulting should bring, in house, chargeable expertise in Oracle EBS table access for Drill Across and provide reasonable limits on dimension member combinations so there are no unreasonable expectations about the application of multi dimensional cubes to detail, such as revenue by product and customer.
Of the comparable mid-range ERP systems, Dynamics SL competes at the lower end based on price, but also above the high-end based on flexibility, data, and reporting. Being able to stay with the same core accounting from a $100 million dollar company to a $3 billion dollar company shows the range of capabilities.
We found Prophix to be more flexible than the other solutions. It proved to have less of an implementation timeframe, and we felt more comfortable supporting the system ourselves post-implementation. We were also surprised to find that Prophix's pricing was more competitive than its rivals, which made the decision process quite easy.
We are a medium sized company, but the structure of Prophix would seemingly adapt to whatever sized organization you have. It also can be applied in any area of an enterprise that needs performance management, whether it involves financial data or not. The potential for application within the enterprise is really only limited by you imagination.
The greatest impact Prophix has had is provided useful data for business decisions, especially with variance analysis and real time production data.
Prophix has saved our company a considerable amount of time during our budgeting/forecast process as well as reporting actuals and variance to managers.
